Anna Langfus is a forgotten writer; to the extent that she’s remembered at all, it’s as the recipient of the Goncourt prize of 1962, for Les Bagages de sable. She was a refugee from the second world war, who grew up in a Jewish family in Lublin, Poland. She survived by adopting the identity of a non-Jewish friend, Maria. After war’s end, she felt unsafe during the anti-Jewish public sentiment in Poland and made up her mind to leave for France. There she started writing plays and managed to publish three books, somewhat based on her own experiences, 1960, 1962 and 1965. Bagages de sable is the second one of these books. The title means luggage of sand, which strikes me as a good image. When it was translated to English in 1965, it got the title “The Lost Shore”.
It is about a young woman displaced from another country, to France. She meets an older man with whom she enters an affair. It is never mentioned what country she is from, or what she has lived through, but there is a palpable sense of a wound or a trauma in her past. In this way, I believe it is quite an innovative book, where she touches upon themes later explored by the likes of Georges Perec, and China Miéville in This Census-taker.
I have a pet theory where female holocaust survivors who wrote about their experiences often wrote three books, and that this was a kind of exorcising of their trauma. The first book about their childhood, the second of their time in the camps and the third about their life afterwards. I don’t think Langfus really fits that mould, but she was one of the earliest survivors to write about their experiences. Along with Piotr Rawicz (also originally from Poland) and Elie Wiesel (who wrote in Yiddish) she was among the first survivors to deal with their survivorship in literary form in France, and among the first of any country, really.
She is not entirely forgotten, however. The fact that she was awarded the Goncourt Prize (France’s highest literary honor) helps to slow her descent into obscurity. There are also memorial plaques in France and in Poland, as well as a community library bearing her name, in Sarcelles, Paris. Recent years has also seen a Facebook group created to commemorate her work. If she hadn’t died suddenly in 1966 maybe she had been able to write more books. She was in the process of writing a book while she died, according to her biographer Jean-Yves Potel, who wrote “Les disparations d’Anna Langfus” in 2014, a book which sparked renewed interest in Langfus and her writing.
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This is the second time I write about a holocaust survivor in the Year club. I previously wrote about Herman Sachnowitz in 2021.
Two who love each other (inthe original Danish “to som elsker hin anden”, Tove Ditlevsen, 1960)
This Danish novel about adultery is constructed as a love triangle, whose chapters alternate between the wife Inga, the husband Torben, and his 19-year old lover Eva. I get the feeling that the writer Tove Ditlevsen has experienced all three of these situations in her real life and is therefore good at describing the feelings of each of the characters very well. Sometimes it really shows that this is written almost 60 years ago, with depictions of male behavoir that wouldn’t be accepted after third wave feminism, I guess. Interesting to read a writer that has been so talked about, although I wasn’t thrilled to learn that she has been compared to Kerstin Thorvall. What is an American equivalent to Tove Ditlevsen? I like the poetic style it is written in, with lots of beautiful similes and thoughts woven into the text. Ditlevsen started as a poet, after all. I was a bit wary of her writing before, because I got the sense that she was the type of writer who liked to get drunk and then write about all the mistakes that are the results of her debauchery, a genre that I’m not really all that interested in. Life writing – is that a kind of nomer designed to belittle its referent?
I read aSwedish translation, with the title “Bekännelser av ett sovjetseklets barn” (“Confessions of a Child of the Soviet Century”) from 1963.
It is fascinating to read Yevtushenko’s reminiscing and anecdoting in this slim volume intended for Western readers. He was a poet in a country and time where poetry was taken very seriously, which is impressive to be reminded of. He describes important turning points in his development and in his life as a poet, along with meetings with Boris Pasternak and Semyon Kirsanov. He maintains his reverence for the simple man, and argues about the hypocrisy found in the hearts of most men. One gets the feeling that it is a quite pure-hearted human being who wrote these lines. A powerful section of the book describes the writing and first recital of his famous poem Babiy Yar, about a brutal pogrom outside Kiev in 1941. Yevtushenko lived for over half a century after this memoir was written, spending his most latterly years in the US, teaching at a college in Oklahoma. Reading this inspired me to read more Russian and Soviet autobiographies, like those of Kropotkin and Gorky.
I’ve wanted to read this book since I was a teenager. As a young an, I read the first 30 pages, before I had to return the library copy I’d borrowed. The wait to finish the book was long, but it probably was for the better as I think I could enjoy the book more now that I am a bit older.
The story concerns drifting bachelor “Binx” on the eve of his 30th birthday. He lives in New Orleans, works in insurance and enjoys going to the cinema. He has a colorful family and sometimes goes out with his secretaries for drinks or swimming. The writing style is somewhat confessional and often touches on themes of religion, existence and sorrow. It is said that the whole novel is informed by Danish proto-existential and master angstrider Søren Kierkegaard, whom Percy was deeply influenced by. It is also a comedic book; I find myself many times stopping to savour the funny sentences and well-put phrases. Moreover, I like that the narrator is a movie buff, and that throughout the novel is strewn references to movies and film stars from the 40s and 50s.
I learned upon finishing the book that Walker Percy was a medical doctor who after a reminder of his own mortality decided to quit his job and try his luck as a writer. This book became part of a canon of books by “southern writers”, a group which included Percy and names such as Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, John Kennedy O’Toole, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. I watched a program of William F. Buckley’s interview program where Percy and Eudora Welty were invited to discuss “southern literature”, in which Percy returned to the fact that the southern writing has a flavor of the “tragic sense of life”, because they were on the losing side of the Civil War. Percy also had plenty of reason to cultivate a tragic sense of life, because both his father and other relatives committed suicide, which might explain why he was so drawn to existentialist themes. This is a book that easily lends itself to a literary obsession, which is evidenced by several articles across the internet by middle-aged men who write about their annual rereading and contemplation of “the Moviegoer” since their youth. There is also (unsurprisingly) a movie list of all the films referenced in the novel on the film aficionado site MUBI.
This was a quick, fun read, by a writer I’ve been meaning to dip into for ages. Lodge is known for his books about academic life, and the character Morris Zapp. Those books were written later, in the 70s and 80s. Lodge has also written extensively about literary theory, and has lectured on literature for many years. I have come across his literary studies when researching “stream-of-consciousness” and other things. I also read him in a book I found in the janitorial office of a business hotel in Reykjavik in 2008, and when I pointed it out it was gifted to me by the custodian Marcin. This book “The Art of Fiction” is a collection of Lodge’s columns on literary style from the Independent on Sunday. Anyway, on with the novel!
The British Museum if Falling Down is about a young literary scholar who spends his days in the British Museum. He is also the father of three children and is afraid to have a fourth. Because he and his wife are Catholic, they are not allowed to use birth control methods. The book is set during one day in the spring of 1963 and a marker of contemporaneity is the brief discussion of Beatlemania. In the afterword it is revealed that the book is structured to be aping the prose style of ten different 20th century writers. Quite a steganographic little ruse, is it not? It also impressed upon me the idea of writing about a library. The British Library was housed in the BM until 1966. Nowadays that space is a book shoppe, and the British Library moved to another location.
This, my first encounter with the writings of mrs Spark, has been a most satisfactory read. Muriel Spark was added to my “prospective reading” list quite recently, and this novel about a “half-Jewish” woman on a pilgrimage in the Middle East caught my interest. I have since learned that Spark has written 22 novels, and this is the longest one of them all (her usual output being rather of the length of short novels, about 100-200 pages). This was an important novel for Spark, probably because it allowed her to explore different parts of her heritage and identity. One critic pointed out that after this book, Spark turned her attention away from a writerly outlook based on realism in favour of a couple of novels grounded in surrealism (The Driver’s Seat, Not to Disturb). All fine and well, but what is the book about?
It is the story of Barbara Vaughan, a thirty-something spinster, recently converted to Catholicism (having grown up with a mixed home environment with a Protestant father and a Jewish mother) on a pilgrimage in Israel. The name of the eponymous gate might not be recognised by anyone born after 1967 but it was a makeshift passage between east Jerusalem and Jordan – a gate through which Barbara passes several times throughout the novel. Miss Vaughan has found a lover in the archaeologist Harry Clegg, digging in Potter’s field in Jordan. She is befriended by a British diplomat, Freddie Hamilton, an arab spy-cum-insurance agent-cum-tourist guide Yousef “Joe” Ramdez, the maronite tradesman Alexandros and a slew of other characters who pass in and out of this novel. Quite early in the story are we introduced to the world of spying, double-crossing, and intrigue.
This novel is plot-wise quite dense, but what I love most is the quipping prose and the steady clip of the writing. It is quite a prodigious gallery of personages that capture various aspects of life in the Middle East. (it did at least ring true to me, based on a rather meager pool of experience). It made me both want to revisit Israel and simultaneously to put it off. Actually, the book doesn’t deal much with Israel as such. It is very much a British perspective, and I was a little apprehensive as to whether that would affect my own view of the country. I was chiefly interested in reading this book to see how it handled the issue of being “half-Jewish”, a pitiable construct which does service to no-one and leaves dissatisfied all of those concerned. Here, an illuminating passage from early on in the book, when Vaughan converses with a taxi driver (oh, those conversations with Israeli taxi drivers, how I remember them):
She recalled that day she had been driven by a guide along the road to Caesarea … It was eleven in the morning:
‘A half-Jew?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which half?’
‘Through my mother.’
‘Then you are a whole Jew. The Jew inherits through the mother by Jewish Law.’
‘I know that. But one says half-Jew to mean that one of the parents is a Gentile and the other -‘
‘But the Jew inherits through the mother. You are then a full Jew by the Law.’
Yes, but not according to the Gentile parent’s law.’
‘What was your father’s Law?‘
That was a question indeed.
I’m afraid he was a law unto himself.’
(pp. 30-31)
The eponymous Mandelbaum gate in Jerusalem, discontinued after the war of 1967.
Another area of interest is the way Spark characterises the Arabs and their thinking. And the British. It has been said that this book, all things counted, is not entirely a success, compared to Sparks other books. Her style doesn’t fully flower in this mode, as it were. Not having read any other Spark books, I find myself in a unique position to judge this book without recourse to inter-oeuvre comparison -which I consider a luxurious position to be in. Spark’s writing is known for its biting wit and sharp observational style, incorporating odd characters and funny off-beat situations. This book has a few of those, and in the final part of the book, almost in excess with the mix-up mania in an old chapel in Jericho.
Late in her life, Muriel Spark was accused by her first son, Samuel Robin Spark, of being inconsiderate. This was a very sordid affair, with lots of public name-calling. It was sparked by the question of whether she is considered Jewish or not – a theme which appears throughout this book. Another of her books (Territorial Rights) includes a scene where a woman is torn apart by two lovers – which might be an image of how Spark saw her two cultural traditions. Others have analysed Spark strictly as a Catholic and have envisioned her writing style as imitating God (The Driver’s Seat has been described as a “whydunnit” as opposed to a “whodunnit” because the murdered is revealed in the first page, ergo the narrative perspective is similar to that of an all-seeing deity). Another book also has a religious theme, The Only Problem, in which the main character is grappling with the old “theodicy problem”.
Muriel Spark was appropriated by all kinds of people in the 90s, everybody wanted to claim her (a bit like the hedge runner Lyudmila Engqvist in Sweden at about the same time period), Scots, Brits, Jews, Jews, Catholics (that’s right, I wrote Jews twice because I meant first Jews as a people and second as a religion, even though the division is not made quite that easily).
Muriel Spark would have turned 100 in 2018, which prompted all those who loved her to arrange celebrations of her work, and a big centenary was organised in Royal whatever Hall in Edinburgh. The Scottish-Jewish community also made a thing of it, and a woman called Tracey S. Rosenberg wrote a follow-up to Mandelbaum Gate called “the Western Wall”.
I might continue to read Muriel Spark, but in that case it would be for her prose. Her writing doesn’t seem to imbue me with any sense of Jewish pride, which I seem to want from time to time in my reading.
Kinship of all Species 